bought a bag of the big picture i'm tom hartman coming up in this half hour thanks to global warming and pollution coral reefs across the globe are disappearing at an alarming rate the same reefs also have to contend with toxic seaweed but new research suggests they have an ally in their fight for survival tell you all about it in tonight's science like an intern i'd say daily take yesterday president obama met with corporate leaders to get their thoughts on the impending fiscal cliff but they used to be a time in america when a strict boundary existed between corporations and the state and we get that boundary back and remove corporate interests from our government.

part of the year take my take live the phone lines are now open so if you want to tell me your opinion make a comment or ask a question why have on the air give us a call at two zero two nine zero four twenty one thirty four so now for the first caller the night steve in spokane washington hey steve what's up hey i just wanted to talk about the electronic voting machines. their. poll or. showing in keeping accurate count. the years i worked in a. hospital the mad nurses the so-called people machines to. set out man occasions and nurses call them diebold and probably the more appropriate name for the as in diameter

sheena connally. because they didn't they didn't they didn't keep back or accurate count of the medications they couldn't even get the medications out of a machine yeah ok and to go in and help them reboot them several times they had representatives in amazing save up correcting them i appreciate you calling in thank you very much and for sharing that with us george in philly george thank you very much for calling your take my take you live here on the on the big picture what's on your mind tonight. i just want to really say it's just a pleasure not to have to watch the corporate driven news all the time to be able to get more truer picture of what's really happening in the world today and i just want to say thank you so much for providing that for. my pleasure our pleasure did you have a question or comment beyond that or was it just an appreciation call that was appreciation also like to say to that just truly enjoy the do in

a political campaign that truman have said that you attack the right wing the right wing motivated government here it is just ridiculous it really has got to be totally ridiculous that we have people who would actually watch our country fall just to prove a point is very bad resume george appreciate call thank you very much very kind of you mark in toronto anoda on ninety eight mark walk right on hi tom really want to see i appreciate your program today i'm up here in canada and i just want to let you know that there is we've got a new phenomena peer called sun news and your version of fox news right well you know i actually put your typically referred to it as fox news north but that's actually with the applied as with the original license approach really. kind of. simply republican bankers appear to undermine the fine system so it's just an interesting phenomena. actually come up here to change the debate is there

a progressive equivalent or is it just. the new fox news the canadian fox news versus the canadian broadcasting corporation c b c well i think we've got some really good public broadcasting and i think we've got some pretty high standards for c.b.c. ok well. yeah thank you thank you so much for calling sharing that with us mark and thanks for watching in canada surely in philly ninety nine shirley welcome to the program and thanks so much for calling and for watching what's on your mind tonight . i want to talk about. i when he was a prisoner. and what mccain did as a prisoner of war and why if you make it so much could you please. help me i missed

and people who did ok. surely thank you for the call and i appreciate your passion i my understanding is that john mccain i mean there there were some stories about him not being the very best but i don't think that you can criticize a man who's in a prison camp during a time of war. whatever he did that's what you have to do to survive and i don't think it's for us to judge my take on what john mccain is doing in saying right now running around with this whole benghazi thing i mean today there was mccain held a press conference at noon to publicly criticize the president for not giving him the secret inside skinny on what's going on in ghazi. when from eleven am to one pm in other words right through that press conference that mccain was holding the

administration was holding a behind closed doors classified briefing for senators on the intelligence committee which. which ever committee it is a mccain is on and only only a couple i think was two or maybe three out of nine republican senators who were eligible to show up for this closed door hearing and actually get debriefed on what happened we've been ghazi showed up and mccain was not one of he didn't show up so what this says to me personally is my take on this is that mccain is still about having lost the election four years ago remember he he was beaten pretty badly by president obama and i think he just a sore loser hurley in ontario canada on the extension ninety two hurley welcome to the welcome to the program thanks for calling. and you might want to tell you america is not the move pretty cold up here we would want to live in new. the other one is is the health care system because

a lot of the guests you get on sometimes talk about. you know you have to wait you have to wait six months and months and all that that's a lot of nonsense and i want to put an end to that if you're sick in this country and you need help immediately you get the idea that i have every time on my radio show somebody calls up and trashes the canadian health care system canadians just light up a line saying exactly what you're saying so early i appreciate the call thank you very much and thanks for watching us there in ontario lewis in saratoga california extension ninety seven louis thank you very much for calling what's on your mind and i thought thanks for the great show and and the other person that substitutes for you he does a great job. he answered the phone it was my thought that what i'm calling about is something that. when i was raised with money years ago we never talked about middle class we were a classless society and more and more we talk about us being middle class citizens

we're middle income students and what happens the class society that we have i wish that just changed them calling people middle class all the time well louis i appreciate your perspective and you're raising the topic. my recollection is that middle class upper class lower class whatever those phrases have been around for for my lifetime which i'm guessing is probably at least as long as yours but. and i mean you know maybe we should use words like the proletariat or something but i think that this is what is common usage is the common vernacular now so we're kind of stuck with it i prefer working class frankly we'll see tom and howard ohio tom what's on your mind tonight thank you for calling. hello from central ohio i'm calling because of the report i heard that the united states is going to be energy independent. within the next few years and i'm wondering if it's just

a bunch of corporate propaganda. the. obama administration. our push towards renewables. thomas prevents you for the call appreciate it no it's not just propaganda the best of my knowledge it was an actual scientific study we are awash in natural gas right now because of fracking if fracking doesn't stop we will continue to have very very high levels of natural gas and what they're finding is that they can use very similar techniques to fracking or or identical techniques to fracking to bust up and pull out or oil as well it's have your oil is like the oil that is going to be coming down that pipeline shale oil is coming down the pipeline from canada if that's the case but the problem is making us energy independent doesn't mean it's making its carbon independent these are all carbon fossil fuels fossil based carbon based fossil fuels bad for global warming bad for

the environment we have to we have to move to a renewable form of energy james in philly hey james thanks for calling thanks for watching the program what's on your mind. are you doing great what's up. why is it making a big issue abut do gentle go on with this young lady. yeah i think. i agree with you and i think this is you know hey it's sex and power and opera levels of government is so so you know i appreciate perspective and your concern and in fact i share i really have learned far more about general petraeus his sex life and that of several people around him then i really need to know or want to know frankly but let me just add one thing the f.b.i. agent who broke this poor who started this investigation you have to ask the question he never went to a judge to get a warrant and yet he's hacking into the e-mail of the of the head of the cia if the

head of the cia's e-mail isn't secure from the f.b.i. because of the patriot act and the guy was able to use patriot act powers to do this if the head of the cia's e-mail isn't secure forget about you and me we need to rethink the patriot act number one and number two this guy was a republican he thought that the the you know the investigation was being stonewalled it wasn't going fast enough it was actually going just fine thank you might very much and you took it to eric cantor you know i think in the hopes that cantor would take it to fox news or something so they were trying to make it into something political we just have one minute left frank in chicago hey frank what's on your mind tonight thanks for calling. oh goody goody two shoes frank from chicago my work for you i work for one of my big thank you. my question was mitt romney trying to show his kids sportsmanship. feel action then when this president and i know how you want to go action your thank you frank i

appreciate the call it really is a sad commentary on mitt romney the whole republican culture of victimhood which they've been living up i mean this is what they these guys have been living on for the last thirty years is that they're victims ronald reagan kicked it off with you know we're all having to pay taxes so that the welfare queen can drive a cadillac down and get her welfare jacks a new york times said oh really where is this welfare queen oh i don't know and they went off looking for for six months in new york times while looking for didn't exist that culture of victimization is still alive and well in the republican party and yeah i think that this is actually a very bad example that romney gave not just to his kids but to everybody that's it for your take my take live thank you for all your calls if we didn't get to your calls and i trust back next week. after the break once upon a time in america there was a wall that separated the corporations from the government but today that wall has crumbled into

a million pieces how do we rebuild that wall and make it higher than ever so that our nation can flourish without having to answer to corporate interests i'll tell you in tonight's deleted. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so for lengthly you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else and you hear or see some other part of it and realize everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm tom hartman welcome to the big picture.

here is mitt romney trying to figure out the name of that thing that many americans call a dollar. i'm sorry i'm just a guy who cares an awful lot about what you sir are a fool you know what kind of my terrorist cells in your neighborhood all want to give us a feature isn't he a liberal and a christian point you. can see your beliefs about it because you know that we're going to distract us from what you and i should care about because their profit driven industry that sells of sensationalistic garbage because of breaking news i'm having martin and we're going to break that.

it's thursday let's get geek quantic one of the biggest problems facing ocean ecosystems today is the dwindling number of healthy coral reefs which provide homes for hundreds of species of underwater creatures says the typical reasons for coral reefs decline like pollution another danger call reese face is coming in contact with invasive and deadly species of sea wheat left unchecked seaweed and seaweed algae can overrun a coral reef but now it appears that one killer seaweed touches one particular species of coral acar flora. that coral releases chemical compounds that signal certain varieties of fish to come to the corals aid and eat the seaweed this was

a discovery made by researchers at the georgia institute of technology researchers first caged individual acra pora in a suit a corals for each of the corals the researchers either left some alone or they remove some of the creatures that rely on the coral for a home next researchers test of the reactions that the coral add to choro does decimus festive if is. one of the species of seaweed that is most dangerous and toxic to corals initially when the researchers attached the toxic seaweed to dangle near the coral the first group of fish known as damsel fish simply ignored the chemical calls for help from the corals and ignore the seaweed but two species of small goby fish that rely on the coral for shelter and home became like little hedge trimmers according to the researchers and trimmed down the seaweed both types of gobi fish chewed away at the seaweed until it was no longer brushing against the coral researchers found that the trigger that caused the gobi fish to eat away at

the seaweed came from a chemical secreted by the coral it's. self the mutual beneficial beneficial relationship between the go eat fish and the coral is a prime example of what nature is referred to as a symbiotic relationship but besides discovering a new symbiotic relationship what's the bottom line to all of this new research well the fact is there's an incredible amount of communication going on between organisms and among organisms in our environment and in the case of the coral in the gobi fish that communication is essential for survival if we want nature and the environment around us to thrive and survive it's essential that we work to reduce the pollution curb the climate change that threatens to cut off these crucial lines of communication between organs.

the father of our constitution james madison had an interesting take on the separation between church and state as he wrote to baptist church leaders in eighteen eleven and he was president he said i've always regarded the practical distinction between religion and civil government as essential to the purity of both madison knew that we shouldn't mix religion and government just to protect ourselves against the rise of the theocrats and not just to do that but also to preserve religion itself and its purest form free from political meddling both entities church and state are better off when they're separated entirely from each other. interestingly the same maxim holds true when it comes to corporation and state. when mixed both become corrupted not just the government but our

founding fathers knew this all too well as they had rebelled not just against a monarchy in seven hundred seventy six but also against the world's largest transnational corporation the east india company just before the american revolution virtually all the members of the british parliament were stock holders of these did the company attempt had made their fortunes in that company and the company generously funded parliamentary elections sound familiar with parliament completely captured the east india company was then able to get what was then the biggest corporate tax cut in the history of the world it's called the seven hundred seventy three that allowed them to undercut independent t. distributors here in the colonies the costs were furious about this because wal-mart is ation of the tea business and they were spotted by dressing up like indians boarding east india company ships and throwing a million dollars worth of the end east india companies tea into boston harbor triggering the american revolutionary war that might explain why our founding

fathers after independence specifically chose not to give corporations any rights in our constitution or even mention the word corporation at all in the entire document. but core corporate power in america is relentless within one hundred years of american independence morally bankrupt corporate slave masters in the south and rich bankers and industrialists in the north tore our nation apart into a civil war abraham lincoln was forced into an unholy alliance with those corporations in the north giving them enormous subsidies to build railroads across the nation to help the war effort and once the war was over the vanderbilt's the goulds the other railroad elites rose up with their fortunes corrupted our government and ushered in the robber baron era alarmed by this and the capture of the republican party by these robber barons and his eighteen eighty eight state of

the union address president grover cleveland the only democrat to serve as president during the gilded age from the from the death of abraham lincoln until to woodrow wilson basically describe the grim situation in america saying as we view of the achievements of aggregated capital we discover the existence of trusts combinations of monopolies all the citizens struggling far in the rear or as trampled to death beneath an iron field corporations we should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people are fast becoming the people's masters this is from his state of the union address but by the year of the turn of the twentieth century working people were fighting back labor movements and grassroots populism forced the president teddy roosevelt republican roosevelt to say in one nine hundred twelve to be foul the unholy alliance between corporate business and corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of

the statesmanship of the day. roosevelt finally constructed a wall separating corporation and state it was known as the tillman it passed in one thousand and seven it was the very first law ever limiting corporate money in our elections at the federal level as the law states it shall be unlawful for any national bank or any corporation organized by authority of any laws of congress to make a money contribution in connection with any election to any political office those corporations that broke this law were subject to big fines and executives faced hard prison time corporate corrupted government had lit the fuse to war twice and ruled during an era of unprecedented abuse of working people in the united states with the tillman act roosevelt hoped a complete separation between the two would defend against the same mistakes of the past unfortunately he was wrong a decade later just

a decade later republican warren harding won the presidency on a platform that literally promised quote less government and business more business and government and quote that was a campaign slogan more scandals followed corrupting our government business was corrupted to having gotten what they wanted in fewer regulations and lower taxes corporations went on a speculative frenzy the one nine hundred twenty s. right creating massive real estate and stock market bubbles that eventually burst in one thousand nine hundred eighty nine triggering the republican great depression and adding to the rap sheet of the consequences of the unholy alliance between corporation and state there was president franklin roosevelt describing the horrors of corporate government in one nine hundred thirty six. we bottle with the old adam is the. business and from that come up way back you might reckless banking class i'm talking to them like some of them profiteering. they had because of the

sort of the government of the united states as they move up so that our own up. and we don't know that government by. monday. have gotten much by are going to mop now fast forward to two thousand and ten with its citizens united decision the us supreme court overturned that wall separating corporations and state that wall known as the tillman act for the first time in over a century corporations could spend unlimited money influencing our elections and our government the robber barons this time under names like coke and abel soon returned with their corporate war chests overflowing with political blood money americans that are well aware of corporate monies corrosive impact on our government there's the lobbying the revolving door the crony capitalism the super pacs the dark money groups the undeniable slant of all legislation favoring the

billionaire class over the working class but fewer americans are aware of the similar corrupting influence back on business itself if there's one thing the corporate elite who gave hundreds of millions of dollars to karl rove to buy the election should learn from last tuesday it's that they would be better off just focusing on their own damn business called air and robert murray recently announced he's laying off one hundred sixty three people. because he says president obama was reelected he claims the do to in obama's second term his country must go into survival mode it is company murray energy wasn't in trouble just weeks before the election when robert murray shelled out one hundred thousand dollars in campaign contributions to karl rove's super pac or when he spent another three million dollars on lobbying and other political contributions just over the past year after all those failed tries to buy seats for republican politicians robert murray claims his company just can't afford to keep workers on the payroll any more but what if

he had all this political contributions back he could easily keep those people and there's applebee's franchisees st angle who gave thousands to republican politicians this election cycle and is now promising to lay off workers because he doesn't want to comply with the obamacare mandate of providing health insurance to his employees. this election alone with the wall of the tillman act and rubble outside groups financed mostly by corporate money spent over a billion dollars trying to defeat president obama and progressives on top of that the u.s. chamber of commerce opened up its coffers this year and spent an additional ninety five million dollars lobbying our government in two thousand and nine and two thousand and ten the chamber spent roughly one hundred fifty million dollars each year this flood of corporate money into our politics whether through lobbying or electioneering happens every single year in america corrupting our democratic

institutions but also corrupting our private sector economy how many more millions of americans would be working today if we're rather than investing a billion dollars in mitt romney the corporate elite had invested a billion dollars in research and development for new factories or hiring new workers rather than spending one hundred million dollars lobbying this year what if the corporate elite had used that money to give their workers health insurance or pensions or better wages sure by unwinding their tentacles around washington d.c. the corporate elite might lose some of some small fraction of their own individual fortunes they might have to pay a little more in taxes and subsidies for shipping jobs overseas subsidies might just disappear but in the long run with a healthier more productive and more satisfied workforce their businesses would grow and flourish and so too would their own wealth it's time to rebuild that wall separating corporation and state for which teddy roosevelt laid the cornerstone

more than one hundred years ago. and that's the way it is that i thirst over fifth two thousand and twelve and i'll forget the modesty begins with you you know they're going to add to your. world with. science technology innovation all the rest of elements from around russia we've got the huge earth covered. more news today violence has once again flared up. and these are the images the world has been seeing from the streets of canada. china corporations are all day.

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